Okay, if you are Real Old (like me) you used to go to the movie theater to see these old-format 3D (almost all horror) movies, and when you bought your ticket they'd give you a pair of cardboard cheesy 3D glasses.

They have a fancy technical name: anaglyph glasses, with a red cellophane or plastic lens over your left eye, and a blue (technically cyan) lens over your right eye. Your anaglyph glasses "decoded" red and blue images on the movie screen or in a comic book image for your brain, and thus appeared to let you see the color-prepared 2D image in what fairly successfully seemed like a 3D image.

The thingamabob, in n or, with your cheesy cardboard anaglyph glasses, (n+1) dimensions, is a production of the wonderful (and FREE!) Knotplot software.

VAMRI (Vleeptron Advanced Mathematics Research Institute) wishes to point out that "Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone," (1983) starring young Molly Ringwald, seems to have been the movie that killed old-style anaglyph 3D. No studio released a 3D movie for decades after that. In the plot, a horrible ancient ugly cyborg monster had a way to live forever by sucking the Youth Essence out of feisty minors like Molly. Totally disgusting, in a way to delight Saturday kiddies matinee audiences.

Hitchcock's "Dial M For Murder" (1954) was shot in anaglyph 3D, but by the time it was released, the 3D fad was over, so it was just released as an ordinary 2D color film. But that's why "Dial M" is filled with screwy weirdly-skewed outsized camera shots (e.g. giant scissors) seemingly flying directly at your eyeballs.

New Format 3D -- the 3D effect in RealD is far superior to old anaglyph 3D, and in its first few years it was clear that a RealD movie draws in twice the audience as the same flick without RealD -- has tickled the crap out of Cahiers du Vleeptron.

We first saw and loved "Journey to the Center of the Earth," a RealD project starring and produced by Brendan Fraser. Swear to god there were scores of pretty blue birds flying out of the screen all over the theater.

But to date, the most wonderful achievement of the new RealD technology is "A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas" (2011), which S.W.M.B.O. grudgingly agreed to see with me at the Multiplex Cine-Odeon 14, but only while wearing a paper bag with eyeholes over her head. (It's the Christmas season, so watch for limited theater showings, maybe midnight cult showings, and GO SEE IT.)

RealD bought an earlier pioneer in 3D movie technology, StereoGraphics, founded by Lenny Lipton, who wrote the lyrics for "Puff the Magic Dragon."

2 comments:

hiya Joanna, I don't understand ... would you like to check my teeth as a clue to my Oldness or Real Oldness? I could FedEx my teeth to you, you could check them in 2 or 3 days. (Meanwhile I shall have to eat only hummus and soft unpasteurized frommage.)

Rude people have commented that My Inner Child never grew an Outer Adult.

Joanna, your link led me to an on-line .com which (creates &?) $ells College Admission Application Essays. Does your mother know this is what you do for a living?

But you have the right to know that in the previous Millennium, Vleeptron Dude wrote and sold English assignment papers for the Engineering students down the hall in my dorm. My parents began to wonder why I wasn't signalling them for money as much. I guaranteed all customers at worst a B+ or A-.

And I wrote an admissions essay that got a right-wing high school punk into Harvard. His mother was so impressed with my essay that she helped a refugee from the Khmer Rouge genocide recount her childhood experiences, and that got her into Tufts no sweat.

I guess I just feel creeped out a bit by the transition of My Youthful Sins (I had all my teeth then) into an on-line production dot com, illiterates enter VISA number and click HERE to leap into the college or uni of the Dumbkopf's desire.

Clearly, the Cyberfuture sux the hairy wazoo. And could you send me your mom's e-mail address? She should know what her little Joanne is up to these days.